This year, to my great surprise, Zend has invited me to reprise the presentation I gave at ZendCon as a webinar. I am thrilled to have this opportunity although the thought of addressing an international audience is, frankly speaking, a bit daunting. But, sometimes a grrl just has to do, what a grrl has to do!

WEBINAR: The Truth About Lambdas and Closures in PHPMarch 29, 2012: 9am PDT
One of PHP 5.3′s terrific features is the ability to use lambdas, a feature which will surely relegate PHP 5.0′s lambda-style in the guise of create_function() to the dust-bin of cyberspace. This presentation will focus on what exactly lambdas are as well as the difference between a lambda and a closure, or whether there is any given their implementation in PHP. In addition, we’ll have a look at improvements pertaining to closures in PHP 5.4. Far greater emphasis is on live code demonstrations as well as in-depth discussion about the code.

Presenters: Sharon Lee Levy & Kevin Schroeder

You may find that my presentation deviates from the dry fare that typically characterizes technical talks. My methods may be unconventional, but hopefully will aid in clarifying the subject of anonymous functions in PHP and at the same time, pique the interests of everyone, including women and girls so they may explore PHP and computer programming.Read the rest of this entry »

Neighboring exhibition booth, and Los Angeles area development and networking group Python Ladies, took this picture of our walking penguins at SCALE10x. Thanks and kudos to LinuxChix Los Angeles group member Betty for both original idea and the overall organization of ‘project inflatable’ for our LinuxChixLA booth’s popular give-aways.

My favorite flavor of Linux for the Zipit is the Root Nexus image http://zipit.rootnexus.org/ which has the most updated version of Debian, Debian SID. The Ubuntu image is wonderful also, but is a work in progress, and some of the hardware drivers are not quite working yet. The Ubuntu distro shows great promise though and I am sure all the bugs will be worked out soon.

The most popular distribution for the Z2 is the Aliosa27 image, which uses an older stable version of Debian and the Fluxbox window manager. Hunterdavis.com has a wonderful instructional video and article on how to flash the Zipit Z2 and install the Aliosa27 image: http://hunterdavis.com/archives/201

2. Extract the image file to an easy to find location on your computer

3. Plug the Micro SD card back into your computer. Don’t worry about the files on the card. The imaging process will delete them.

4. Open a terminal and as root find the location of your SD card. I like to use the command fdisk -l to list all hard drive partitions/external devices and their locations

5. Use dd to copy the extracted image from the computer to your SD card. Change name_of _image.img to the name of your image and change sdx to the device location of your SD card:

dd if=name_of_image.img of=/dev/sdx

This command will write the image to your SD card, and set up proper partitions. You will not receive any feedback from the terminal, but you should not get any errors either. This could take a while to complete, 20 or 30 minutes, so be patient!

6. Once the command finishes, remove the SD card and put it in the Zipit. You should boot into Debian and be prompted to login. User is root, and password is debian. If you can login successfully you now have a working version of Debian installed on your Zipit! Yeeaaahhhh!!!!!

Although, the name of the image might be different and your login may differ, this technique works exactly the same for any Linux distribution you download for your Zipit Z2. Have fun experimenting!

When in Terminal:

Make sure to change your root password with the command passwd in a terminal.

Run apt-get update to update the repository lists.

Then apt-get install any applications of your choice!

Use startx at the command line to start the Fluxbox etc. window manager.

I love the Window Maker window manager so I have been having fun

customizing it for my Zipit

When in a Window Manager:

Pushing the [Options] button on the Zipit will enable mouse mode via the arrow keys on the top right of the keypad. The middle button in the center of the arrow keys is the right click and the stop/play buttons to the left of the arrow keys function as the left click. Clicking [Options] again will enable keyboard mode once again. The “…” key is the Ctrl key for the Zipit keyboard. And I have discovered that when it is in mouse mode the number keys become F1, F2 respectively.